Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but these drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent sociopolitical problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.